The Royal “Terrell” Museum in Canada includes a fossil described as a rare “one in a billion” discovery, which is the face of a dinosaur that still retains its amazing skin, despite the extinction of dinosaurs more than 56 million years ago.
Archaeologists discovered the fossil in 2011, and the museum technician, Mark Mitchell, extracted it with extreme precision, by cutting precisely into the stone surrounding the face, in a complex process that took him nearly 6 years.
The face belongs to an armored ankylosaurus, a member of the Borrelopilta marmicichelli family.
In a new interview with Ars Technica, Mitchell said of the painstaking process of extracting the dinosaur’s face: “While preparing, I was putting the blocks together like a puzzle, and the animal’s features were really starting to take shape.”
He went on to point out that just a year before Christmas, he had succeeded in bringing the sides of the neck and head together.
Almost the entirety of this dinosaur—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization, amounting to what's been called a one-in-a-billion find: https://t.co/2plvVTcCqa
[📸: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology] pic.twitter.com/hSTXn5dLnE
— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) January 25, 2023
And the curator of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Donald Henderson, confirms that he bet that the fossil of the dinosaur’s face is a “one in a billion” discovery, literally.
And in 2017, researchers were able to obtain the remarkable fossil of the dinosaur “Borellopylta Markmicelli”, which includes its rough shields, most of its limbs, armor plating, and some of the contents of its guts and stomach, after Mark Mitchell finished processing it, and since then they have published a series of impressive studies on dinosaur.
Another study, led by Brown and his colleagues, posits that the dinosaur “Borylopelta Markmicelli” used a form of camouflage, known as “opposite shading”, to survive, and this may indicate that the Cretaceous period was darker than previously thought. .